


Catch the Trade Winds in your Sails

by ThatPilotGirl



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies), The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, Witch of Blackbird Pond - Elizabeth George Speare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2016-11-02
Packaged: 2018-08-28 16:16:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8453173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatPilotGirl/pseuds/ThatPilotGirl
Summary: Elizabeth finds a diary.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I own neither of the works referenced here.

When Elizabeth was very young, she used to explore the cemetery where the great men and women of Barbados were buried, their tombstones carved beautifully in marble. As she grew up, there was less and less time to get away, but still, the little corner where you could see the water was a favorite spot to curl up with a book and a daydream. The three headstones there, nearly a century old were her friends and her confidants. The Tylers.

When she marries Will, she takes him there too, introduces them to him and he to them. Sometimes they sit there together, listening to the waves and wondering about Jack and Anamaria.

Her father dies 2 years after she is married, and is buried in the same plot. She slips away after the funeral to seek comfort, and when she looks up at the water, she sees black sails on the horizon. They leave that very night.

* * *

They are back in Barbados for a day, and Elizabeth wants to see her father so when they get to shore she bids everyone farewell and sets off for the graveyard. She pays her respects to him, and to the Tylers, then comes back down to the market to buy fresh fruit and perhaps some trinkets. It is on the latter thought that she steps into a new shop, selling all manner of old things. Her eye is caught by a book, a diary from the looks of it, and she opens the cover to see "Property of Katherine Tyler," written on the inside cover. Her thoughts go to the graves, but there is no Katherine there. Still she keeps reading, and within the first page, the death of a beloved grandfather, Francis, is mentioned. She buys the book.

* * *

The diary becomes a prized possession, living on the bookshelf in the big cabin that the four of them share but often removed when she needs a companion. She and Kit are so similar in their ways, discontent with expectations, in love with their island, adventure in their veins. 

She reads, over and over, of the winter in Connecticut (she had never seen snow,) of the summers in Saybrook with Hannah the other Mistresses Eaton, of the panic when one year, she lost track of Hannah's herbs and found herself with child.

"But Nat and I have made a scheme," Kit writes. "Since the babe will be born in spring, I will take no upriver journeys with him, except once to visit my cousins. I will spend a whole year in Saybrook, though I shall loathe the snow, and the second winter go back to Barbados with him, leaving the child with Hannah and his grandmother. Then I will come back to Connecticut. At the end of the third summer, we shall take the child with us. Nat will partition off a part of the guest cabin in the meantime, so when we are ready to rejoin him, there will be a space for the new addition."

Kit and Nat name their daughter Leah, Elizabeth calls all of her her favorite deck cats Katherine.

* * *

A hundred years into the future, the Seahawk makes a stop in Barbados. Charlotte Doyle finds her way to a shop selling old things, and is drawn to two diaries. Kit Eaton, of the Carribean and Connecticut and the With, and Scarlet Elizabeth, of England and the Caribbean and the Black Pearl.

**Author's Note:**

> "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. " -Mark Twain.


End file.
